The Big Ten’s New Era of Long Flights
As the truth has a habit of waiting 20 or 30 years to emerge, maybe sometime around 2050 some retired Big Ten football coach or player will recall with a grimace the last weekend in September 2025, when the old conference reached a peak in its newfangled era of long flights. In its second season since it hogged four West Coast schools to become coast-to-coast and wreaked worry about college athletes suffering unprecedented dehydration and fatigue, the Big Ten comes across a nutty pinnacle of an air-miles Saturday.
All within a conference, unbeaten No. 1 Ohio State will play at unbeaten Washington (2,004 miles apart), unbeaten No. 6 Oregon will play at unbeaten No. 3 Penn State in the biggest national game of the week (2,287 miles), unbeaten No. 21 USC will play at No. 23 Illinois (1,700 miles), UCLA will play at Northwestern (1,734 miles), and Rutgers will play at Minnesota (995 miles). By this measure, it comes as some oddball throwback that No. 11 Indiana — a team of the moment after its 63-10 mastery docked Illinois from No. 9 to No. 23 — will visit Iowa (3-1), covering a wee 314 miles.
Adjustments for Long Flights
The learning curve on long flights tucked into conference seasons found a fresh rung in the Ohio State football laboratory, which dug into its knack for self-scrutiny and made a tweak. Whereas it left for Oregon last October on the Friday before the game, it left for Washington on Thursday. Referring to the 32-31 loss out in Eugene, Coach Ryan Day told reporters in Columbus: “I thought we were ready, and we were playing fast. I don’t think there was anything sports-science-wise that says us leaving the day before had any effect on the game. … I think it’s more about: Are you focused? Are you locked in? Are you sluggish? You look at all these different metrics. Didn’t see any of that. But that being said, we always want to get better, and we’ve done a lot of studying on this. We’ve talked to a lot of people in the NFL. We’ve talked to different other sports and how they travel multiple time zones. We felt this is the best way. We also looked at how we played in the playoffs as an indicator on this.”
It’s one thing to cross time zone after time zone to play an early-season game, such as Iowa State vs. Kansas State in Dublin last month, but another to do so repeatedly. USC went to Purdue two weeks ago; calibrated itself for a start time of 3:30 p.m. Eastern time; won, 33-17; went home; played Michigan State at 8 p.m. Pacific time; won, 45-31; and heads for Illinois to start at 11 a.m. Central time. It’s almost as if TV makes the decisions and bolsters the idea of athletes receiving pay.
After practice this week, surrounded by reporters, USC Coach Lincoln Riley said: “We’ve tried to be aware [that] going from the absolute latest kick in the country to the absolute earliest kick in the country … has its challenges. But the challenge is, like, it is what it is, right? We don’t make the schedule, and so — clearly — we’ve had to adapt a little bit in the way that we prepared and how much that we’ve done. And even when you go back to, you know, Purdue, being a factor now, being so late and getting back so late, it compounds if you’re not careful. So we’ve tried to be mindful of getting our work done but at the same time knowing that we need to take a fresh football team, we need to put a fresh football team on that airplane.”
Challenges of Traveling Across Time Zones
During this first season-and-change, the primo case of this type of circadian discombobulation might have centered on Seattle. Washington played last season Sept. 27 at Rutgers (2,385 miles), then at home against Michigan on Oct. 5, then Oct. 12 at Iowa (1,556 miles) and then, after a week off, Oct. 26 at Indiana (1,870 miles), home against USC on Nov. 2, then Nov. 9 at Penn State (2,218 miles). Compounding this, the Iowa game began at 11 a.m. Central, then the Indiana game began at noon Eastern. When August rolled around this year, second-year Washington coach Jedd Fisch appeared on “Brock and Salk,” a Seattle-based radio show, and told of some of the hardships, getting a generational jump on stating some of the truth. “It’s unique,” he said, “and it’s harder than maybe any of us wanted to give it credit for early on.” He said, “You start realizing that they’re all victims of network TV shows and we’re all looking at ways to figure out a way to get your team ready to go when you’re waking them up at 4:30, their body time, and asking them to go play in a competitive football game like we experienced against Iowa.”
After Washington’s Pac-12 games in 2023 involved roughly 3,100 miles of travel (and it became nearly 5,000 with a nonconference game at Michigan State thrown in), its Big Ten games of 2024 covered 8,278. Washington went 4-0 at home in the league and 0-5 on the road. It’s easier this year, except that after banging around with the considerable bodies of Ohio State, the Huskies will go the following Saturday to Maryland (2,322 miles), then come home for Rutgers, which will travel the 2,385 to play … on Friday.
Oregon’s Experience with Long Flights
One program, of course, handled the newness last season. Amid eight straight weekends of playing, Oregon went to Purdue (1,850 miles) on Oct. 18, to Michigan (1,967) on Nov. 2 and to Wisconsin (1,674) on Nov. 16. It romped through the first two and squeezed, 16-13, past the third, then threw in a Big Ten title game some 1,904 miles from home in Indianapolis in early December. It got through all of that at 13-0 and No. 1 in the nation. Now it makes its farthest trek east, with a system in place. “We’ve done it, right?” Coach Dan Lanning told reporters this week in Eugene. “We’ve been through it. We have a really good routine. Some things are a little bit different each week, depending on where you’re going and how you’re traveling, but our guys handle that well. They understand how important recovery is, what we do when we get to the hotel, what we do before we leave here, right? There’s just a routine that’s been developed for us that we can go execute.”
They’re just underway in the new world, though, for even as they do get a week off after Penn State, they welcome Indiana on Oct. 11, right after which they go all the way above the land and above Penn State and clear to Rutgers (2,460 miles).
